Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 34

This realization may in turn help us understand the novel’s much-discussed, dream-like ending, in which Maggie and her brother Tom drown in a flood, and which is highly problematic when read in realistrealism terms of narrative coherencecoherence and probability. Henry James, for instance, is one of many critics who have been uncomfortable with the novel’s dramatic conclusion, and highly suspicious of its artistic merits: “As it stands, the dénouement shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing has prepared him for it; the story does not move towards it; it casts no shadow before it” (465). In a similar vein, F.R. LeavisLeavis, F.R. suggests that the novel’s ending belongs to “another kind of art” than the preceding sections; the flood in which Tom and Maggie perish constitutes a “dreamed-of perfect accident,” but has “no symbolic or metaphoricalmetaphor value” (488; my emphasis). Less judgmentally, Jane McDonnellMcDonnell, Jane remarks that The Mill on the Floss moves from a realistic portrayal of Maggie towards a more supernatural mode of representationrepresentation typical of such genres as the fairy tale or romanceromance (400).

While Penny BoumelhaBoumelha, Penny agrees that the novel’s ending abandons the realistrealism mode, she is one of the few critics who also notes the crucial, metafictionalmetafiction effect of such a “flagrantly fantasied and contrived” conclusion:

It acknowledges and makes unusually visible the formalform and content-cum-ideological impasse that the novel has reached by virtue of its concentration on the development of a woman for whom no meaningful future […] can be imagined. It breaks out of this impasse only by sweeping the novel out of its realistrealism mode altogether. (29)

According to BoumelhaBoumelha, Penny, the ending of Eliot’s novel serves to expose “the restricted possibilities of the world as it could be imagined by realismrealism,” and the shift to a world of fantasyfantasy and wish-fulfillmentwish-fulfillment thus constitutes a critique of classic realismclassic realism’s unacknowledged limitationslimitations (32–33).121 By flaunting the contrived nature of its conclusion – the flood arrives at the very moment of Maggie’s utmost despair, when she wonders “how long it will be before death comes” (417; bk. 7, ch. 5) – The Mill on the Floss problematizes its status as fiction and highlights the link between generic conventionsconventions, narrative closureclosure, and ideologyideology.122

More specifially, Eliot’s novel dismantles a central convention of the English BildungsromanBildungsroman: its valorization of childhoodchildhood, commonly expressed in endings that depict the protagonist’s fairytale-like return to his or her original home. As Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco has pointed out, the hero’s childhood is not only granted an emblematic prominence in the English Bildungsroman; in contrast to continental examples of the genregenre, the protagonist’s most significant experiences also tend to be “those which confirm the choices made by childhood ‘innocenceinnocence’” (Way of the World 182; emphasis added):

Can you picture a child reading Wilhelm Meister, The Red and the Black, Lost Illusions? Impossible. But Waverley and Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Great Expectations: here we have the ‘great traditiontradition’ of childrenchildren’s literature (and our era, less intimidated by sex, can easily add Tom Jones). […] Could it in fact be that, deep down, these novels are fairy tales? (Way of the World 185)

In the fairytale world of the English BildungsromanBildungsroman, MorettiMoretti, Franco points out, siblings often “magnetically attract the negative values of the narrative universe,” as part of a broader tendency towards moral polarizationpolarization into clear-cut rights and wrongs (Way of the World 186). If continental heroes are happy to leave (and even deliberately defy) their childhoodchildhood homes, the youthful journeys of English protagonists are portrayed as enforced exileexile: “a long and bewildering detour” from the cherished stabilitystability of the original home (Way of the World 203).123 The basic structure of the English Bildungsroman is, in short, regressiveregression, and the often unlikely or even blatantly unrealistic plot twists needed to manufacture a happy ending – the rediscovery of long-lost relativesrelatives, or Rochester’s voice supernaturally calling out to Jane Eyre over the distance of several miles – reveal the extent to which the endings of such novels are concerned, not with reality, but with poetic justicepoetic justice and wish-fulfillmentwish-fulfillment. And of course, almost all of this is true for The Mill on the Floss, too: the sibling who attracts the negative values of the fictional universe (i.e. Tom); the protagonist’s aversion to the idea of having to leave the childhood home; and the restoration of an ‘innocent’ childhood perspective through the reconciliation of Tom and Maggie, brought about by the flagrantly fantasized flood that concludes the novel. There is only one problem with this argument in connection with The Mill on the Floss: its ending may be just as fantasized as all the others – but it is not truly a happy one. How can we make sense of this fantasyfantasy of doom?

Using Slavoj ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj’s Lacanian framework as an analytical tool, we can say that Eliot’s novel ‘traverses the ideological fantasyfantasy’ that structures the English BildungsromanBildungsroman, and in doing so confronts the generic traditiontradition’s traumatic kernel. Here is how ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj defines fantasy:

Fantasy conceals the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolized […] – so what happens with desiredesire after we ‘traverse’ fantasyfantasy? Lacan’s answer, in the last pages of his Seminar XI, is drive, ultimately the death drivedeath drive: ‘beyond fantasy’ there is no yearning or any kindred sublimesublime phenomenon, ‘beyond fantasy’ we find only drive, its pulsation around the sinthomesinthome. (Sublime Object of Ideology 138–139; original emphasis)

For Lacan, fantasyfantasy serves to hide a traumatic kernel, and if we traverse it we will be confronted with the pulsation of the death drivedeath drive around the so-called sinthomesinthome, which ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj defines as “a knot, a point at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation […] meet” (The Ticklish Subject 206). This is a potentially liberating encounter, for ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj suggests that if we untie the sinthome, then the efficiency of the corresponding ideological edifice is suspended (ibid.). Given that, for ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj, ironicirony distance is one of the key ways in which we can “blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy” (Sublime Object of Ideology 30), we may therefore speculate that abandoning ironyirony may be one way to confront the traumatic kernel of ideological fantasies.

If we now apply this theoretical framework to Eliot’s novel, then we can say that The Mill on the Floss manages to traverse the regressiveregression fantasyfantasy of childhoodchildhood that lies at the core of the English BildungsromanBildungsroman precisely through its progressive abandoning of ironicirony distance, which is why the – expected and conventionalconventions – fairytale happy ending turns into a sublimesublime depiction of a pulsating, semi-incestuousincest death drivedeath drive:

Tom, looking before him, saw death rushing on them. Huge fragments, clinging together in fatal fellowship, made one wide mass across the stream.

“It is coming, Maggie!” Tom said, in a deep, hoarse voice, loosing the oars, and clasping her.

The next instant the boat was no longer seen upon the waterwater [… B]rother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted […]. (422; bk. 7, ch. 5)

Maggie is reunited with Tom, who in the course of the narrative has come to embody the Law of the Father, and both are obliterated in what one could call a literal ‘stream of unconsciousnessstream of consciousness’: a fantasized Liebestod in the flood unleashed by Maggie’s death drivedeath drive.124 Once we foreground this submerged psychological drama, it seems almost too fitting that, in the course of the novel, Eliot’s narrator incorporates references to two of psychoanalysispsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism’s favorite tragic narratives: Sophocles’s Oedipus and ShakespeareShakespeare, William’s Hamlet (110 and 325; bk. 1, ch. 13 and bk. 6, ch. 6).

More than merely referring to these tragedies in passing, however, the narrator of The Mill on the Floss in fact launches a systematic analysis of the genregenre of tragedytragedy and its relation to the story of Maggie and her family. Early on in the novel, Maggie already suspects that Tom’s character and actions might make the “future in some way tragic” (15; bk. 1, ch. 3). Later, the narrator compares Maggie to the tragic hero of Sophocles’s play Ajax (56; bk. 1, ch. 7) and even points explicitly to Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in his Poetics (85; bk. 1, ch. 10). At another point, the narrator challenges received ideas about the genre, relating this critique to more general problems of novelistic representationrepresentation:

Mr. Tulliver, you perceive, though nothing more than a superior miller and maltster, was as proud and obstinate as if he had been a very lofty personage, in whom such dispositions might be a source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedytragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublimesublime. The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record – such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise with it, and where the unexpectant discontent of worn and disappointed parents weighs on the childrenchildren like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of life are depressed; or such tragedy as lies in the slow or sudden death that follows on a bruised passion, though it may be a death that finds only a parish funeral. (163; bk. 3, ch. 1)

Against the classic Aristotelian dogma, the narrator maintains that tragedytragedy is not confined to those whom one could call “lofty”; it may also afflict “insignificant people,” who suffer from everydayeveryday conflicts and “the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise.”125 The Mill on the Floss is thus best understood as an attempt not only to stage, but explicitly to conceptualize a novelistic version of domestic tragedy.126

In the course of this exploration of the genregenre of tragedy, the narrator takes particular issue with the idea of the tragic flaw (hamartiahamartia or tragic flaw), understood as a defect of character. Various critics have recently rejected the traditional understanding of hamartiahamartia or tragic flaw as an inherent flaw in the hero’s character. Jennifer Wallace, for instance, argues that the Aristotelian notion of hamartiahamartia or tragic flaw is “less about a character defect than about an error in judgmentjudgment which led to a wrong decision or a wrong course of action” (118–119). It is this very idea – that hamartiahamartia or tragic flaw refers to an error of judgment – which explains why John Drakakis and Naomi Conn Liebler maintain that hamartiahamartia or tragic flaw is related to the notion of dilemma, defined as “the positioning of protagonist, represented communitycommunity and audience alike between two choices of equal value both politically and morally” (9). If a character is faced with two choices of more or less equal value, then an “error in judgment” is of course far more likely to occur. Accordingly, Drakakis and Liebler insist that what may appear to be an innate character flaw in fact often has its roots, “not in the inner psychological life of the protagonist, but in the larger domain of culture” (8). Intriguingly, much the same stance is taken by the narrator in The Mill on the Floss:

[Y]ou have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledgeknowledge of characteristics. For the tragedytragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. “Character,” says NovalisNovalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms–“character is destiny.” But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home. (325; bk. 6, ch. 6)

For Eliot’s narrator, tragedytragedy is not usually the direct consequence of a protagonist’s inherent, tragic flaw, but the result of a fatal misfit between character and circumstances. If, that is to say, the classical BildungsromanBildungsroman assumes that we can recognize ourselves in, and identify with, the wider world as our natural home (i.e. as a place in harmonyharmony with our selves), then tragedy focuses on dissonance and the possibility of breakdown. We can therefore read the ending of The Mill on the Floss, which constitutes such a blatant break with the novel’s realistrealism mode, not only as a critique of the doctrine that tragedy arises “entirely from within,” but also as highlighting tragedy’s impulse towards a violent disruption of what is conceived as the ‘proper’ order.

A tragic novel, then – yet at the same time a novel ending in wish-fulfillmentwish-fulfillment? Can a narrative really be called a tragedytragedy if the outcome fulfills the protagonist’s deepest, death-driven, incestuousincest desires? Perhaps we must not only accept that it can, but even posit that such knowledgeknowledge in fact deepens the tragic experience because it highlights the overwhelming pressures on the protagonist’s selfself. In the course of Eliot’s novel, we have come to see that Maggie may well be overly impulsive – but she is also intelligent, sensitive, and generous. Surely it deepens rather than dilutes the tragedy that such a person should find herself in a situation where her only remaining wishes are to be reunited with, and at the same time to take revengerevenge against, her own brother, who has so often treated her with the harshest contempt. Maggie is “so young, so healthy” (415; bk. 7, ch. 5), yet by the end of the novel this only means to her that death is still a long time to come: she is doomed to live, and thus to experience further pain. So yes, Maggie’s death in the flood at the end of the novel, locked in an erotically charged embrace with her brother, is a fantasyfantasy scenario that allows her to fulfill her conflicting desires. But it is deeply tragic that things should have come to such a pass: that this is indeed the only thing left for Maggie to desiredesire. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie’s desire for “homecoming and reconciliation” can only be fulfilled by death and destruction (FisherFisher, Philip 522) because her society provides “no home, no help for the erring” (417; bk. 7, ch. 5). Nicholas Howe is therefore right when he suggests that thinking about home and homelessnesshomelessness has everything to do with how one defines “a just and decent society” (11). The tragic wish-fulfilment of Eliot’s novel surely constitutes a plea for social changechange, even if it does not – is perhaps unable to – envision the precise nature of this changechange.